Even in a Field of 65,000, It’s Possible to Find a New Niche
By one conservative estimate, 65,000 periodicals are published in North America. From abattoirs to zymurgy, there is scarcely a topic not already covered by some journal. Yet, month after month, new magazines arrive, generated by enthusiasts or entrepreneurs to meet some perceived need or opportunity.
Presentation Products magazine, whose premiere issue has just arrived, seems to have located an empty niche, positioning itself in the $17-billion annual market for products used by businesses, schools and government agencies in making presentations.
Advances in electronic and computer technology have made audio-visual programs more audible, colorful and original than the grainy, garbled films of the past. And new products seem about to revolutionize the industry. According to Ames Cornish, a marketing manager at Apple Computer, “Desk-top presentation could be an even greater opportunity for us than desk-top publishing,” which has dominated consumer attention for the past couple of years.
Presentation Products owner Bill Slapin, who has founded five other successful periodicals on consumer electronics and computer products during a 20-year publishing career, said the 56,000-copy controlled-circulation magazine has met with immediate acceptance from advertisers. By focusing “on the total range of products and services” used by presenters, he noted, the magazine’s first issue has attracted product advertising from Sony, Panasonic, AT&T; and Kodak.
In addition to new products, each issue examines “a specific industry segment,” looks at “trends and updates in a particular category” and offers “applications-oriented features that show our readers how presentation products are actually used.”
The 8 1/2-by-11-inch, 72-page journal is printed on slick stock with a liberal use of color, especially by advertisers. Although it carries a $3 cover price, it is mainly available “to executives in business, government and education who decide what presentation products their institutions use,” said editor Larry Tuck. The premiere issue, May-June, looks at recent developments in big-screen video display devices, in-house photographic slide-making and portable sound equipment, and also has quick takes on new services and equipment from erasable compact disks to laser pointers.
Tuck says initial circulation was based on trade association mailing lists, with more than 20% of the recipients qualified before the first issue was mailed. “We have been getting back about 3,000 of the enclosed subscription cards a day,” he reported, “and expect to be close to 100% qualified by the end of the year.” The magazine will publish every two months beginning in September and assume a monthly schedule in January, 1989.
Slapin’s track record is solid. In 1975, for example, the Los Angeles native started the successful Electronic Retailing, which was aimed at audio professionals. Computer Merchandising magazine, which he founded in 1983, was by 1985 listed at No. 9 on Folio magazine’s rating of the top 400 trade journals.
The same year, he sold his Eastman Publishing, which included an electronic data base service and Software Merchandising magazine as well as Computer Merchandising, to International Thomson, the British-Canadian information services conglomerate. Last month, Thomson folded Computer Merchandising.
“You don’t feel good about it,” Slapin said. “But it’s like when you sell a house you love. You can’t do anything about what the new owners do to it.”
Although Presentation Products is published by the ambitious-sounding Pacific Magazine Group Inc., Tuck said there are no immediate plans for new publications. Those interested in receiving the magazine can get a subscription card by calling (213) 455-1414 or writing the company at 513 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, Calif. 90401.
Beats there a heart so calcified that it does not leap at the knowledge that there is a Society of American Inventors? Far as we have come from the childhood treks in cardboard-box spaceships, don’t we all still occasionally imagine creating something eternally and universally useful (and, we wince in our maturity, perhaps even profitable)?
And so we are happy to know that today’s Edisons and Bells have an organization. Inevitably and to our good fortune, that organization has spawned a magazine, Inventor USA, to celebrate the latest harvest of Yankeee ingenuity or, as the society puts it, to “deal with a variety of inventor-related topics.”
The nonprofit society was founded last year “to promote, assist, advocate and encourage American invention.” As Donald Quigg of the U.S. Patent Office said at the time, in the face of figures showing that 44% of American patents were being granted to foreigners, there is a concern that “the inventive spirit of America is waning.”
By this summer, the group expects to have established connections with local inventor groups in all 50 states. It acts, according to spokesman Stephen LaBour, as “a clearing house of information between inventors, patent attorneys and the Patent Office.” It is co-sponsor with the Patent Office of Project XL, intended to develop a national curriculum encouraging students’ inventive thinking and problem-solving skills.
“The magazine,”LaBour said,”is an important part of our information program.” The premiere issue includes a profile of George Eastman, who developed dry plate photography, a feature on the largest private patent model collection in the world (35,000 items belonging to George Peterson of Beverly Hills), an interview with inventor/entrepeneur John Pfanstiehl, plus regular columns on new inventions, inventor news, legal questions and book reviews.
LaBour says that the magazine’s look has been completely overhauled for the first regular issue in September,”including much better graphics.” Inventor USA, which comes out every other month, is free to the organization’s members (who pay dues of $35 per year) or $20 per year to non-members. The Society of American Inventors is located at 505 E. Jackson St., Suite 204, Tampa, Fla. 33602.
Sassy, the 5-month-old teen magazine patterned on the Australian model, is spending about $200,000 on an image-building national contest to find the “Sassiest Girl in America,” according to a spokesman. The winner of the contest, sponsored jointly with Noxema, will receive $10,000, plus $5,000 for her favorite charity, and be pictured on the cover of the monthly and in a Noxema ad.
The contest is limited to girls between 13 and 19 years old. In the first month, Sassy received over 4,000 responses and hopes to have over 30,000 entrants by the contest’s close on June 30. Six finalists will be flown to New York for a five-day, all-expenses-paid trip.
The folks at Teen magazine seem unperturbed by the contest, perhaps figuring that imitation is the highest form of flattery. The Los Angeles-based magazine has run its own Great Teen Model Search annually since 1981. The 12 finalists are flown to Los Angeles for their fling. The winner receives $5,000 in cash from Maybelline, a $5,000 modeling contract with Gillette, and $5,000 worth of clothes. This year’s contest, which just closed, drew 25,000 applicants.
The second anniversary issure of Tikkun, the progressive Jewish critique of politics, culture and society, features a consideration of “Israel at Forty” by Israeli and American Jewish politicians, journalists and scholars. (Published every other month, Tikkun is $5 an issue, $25 a year; 5100 Leona St., Oakland. Calif. 94619).... The Wilson Quarterly, published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian, celebrates the 50th anniversary of Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concerts with a special section on the place of Tin Pan Alley songwriters, jazz and classical music in American culture ($4.50 an issue, $19 a year for five issues: Wilson Quarterly, Wilson Center, Membership Dept., P.O.B. 52211, Boulder, Colo. 80321-2211)....
You will want: Psychedelic Monographs and Essays. The latest issue (Spring) of the academic biannual, edited by Thomas Lyttle and Phoenix, is on the nostalgic theme of “Psychedelics, Higher Consciousness and Spirituality Psychedelic Research.” Among the topics explored are the relationship between psychedelics and spiritual experience, high lucid dreams and emergent scientific paradigms of reality. The letters pages are fascinating ($9 an issue, $18 a year: PM&E;, 624 N. E. 12th Ave., 1, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. 33301).
